Everything you need to know about Intelligent Invoice Processing

How does your company process invoice? Do you still process loads of invoices manually? What if we tell you we can reduce your invoice processing cost by 80%? Sounds good? Then, Intelligent invoice processing is all you need for better, faster, error-free and improved accuracy. Manual processing might work if you process fewer invoices but not on a large scale. Most businesses are shifting to completely digital. Intelligent invoice processing will give you an edge in processing invoices even when you have a spike in the number of invoices you process, avoiding human errors and any disaster that it might lead to.

Here are a few eye-opening facts proving intelligent invoice processing is the best option. Before we get into the facts, there are certain aspects that you must consider carefully before you choose your optimal method of invoice processing. They are

1. Cost per invoice
2. Invoice turnaround time
3. Cost of late payment and penalties
4. Rate of timely payment
5. Rate of captured early payment discounts
6. Cost of errors
7. Rate of duplicate payments
8. Number of escalations

• The Total Cost of Ownership for a manual processing invoice varies between $6 – $50.
• The invoice turnaround time is 12.4-25 days
• On average, 12.5% of invoices require reworking
• It takes at least 5.55 minutes to rework an invoice
• 33% of companies report that more than 1% of the payments are duplicate or overpayments

Challenges in manual invoice processing:

Human errors:

Enterprises get invoices from various sources and in various formats, like XML files, PDFs, images, and sometimes physical invoices. It takes a lot of labor and effort to bring all these different invoices into the unified system. When enterprises do it manually, there are higher chances of data entry errors, missed data points, losing invoices, etc., leading to paying the same invoice twice, paying the incorrect amount, duplicating invoices, etc.

Inefficient data matching:

When enterprises use manual invoice processing to perform two-way (Invoice is matched with the purchase order) or three-way invoice data matching a purchase order (PO), goods received note (GRN), and contract data, everything is done manually. When this method is used for tons of data, this complex task can lead to overlooking dates, values, or calculations, resulting in overpayments, delayed payments, and causing chaos.

High processing cost per invoice:

Manual invoice processing costs between $6 and $50 for each invoice. In some instances, there can be other unexpected charges for missing early payment discounts, late payment charges, and accounting errors.

Benefits of intelligent invoice processing:

Institute of Finance and Management (IOFM) states that 63% of companies want to reduce invoice processing costs. It also adds that invoice automation is their priority, making it possible with intelligent automation software. Intelligent invoice processing has advanced well beyond Optical Character Recognition OCR. It has advanced AI capabilities like Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML). It can understand an invoice, learn, and provide the best data match. With the advanced AI capabilities, you can automate the complete purchase-to-payment process, from scanning to data extraction to invoice submission on paper or digital.

Emma SAXON’s digitalclerx member is an invoice processing specialist. Emma can intelligently extract valuable data, validate it according to a predefined set, and help you streamline your entire process. She can be your teammate or assist you in invoice processing, accelerating time to delivery.

Here are the significant advantages of choosing Emma as your invoice processing specialist.

• Process Invoice quickly – Emma helps you shorten the invoice processing duration with automated workflows with advanced AI capabilities.
• Minimize to no errors – Emma can collect invoices from any source and intelligently perform data matching, avoiding data loss, miscalculations, and errors.
• Avoid delays and late fees – With timely invoice processing, Emma helps you avoid any late fees or penalties.
• Maximize visibility – Emma provides transparency to the entire process, helping you to resolve issues or queries efficiently.
• Enhance supplier relationships – Timely payments help you maintain better relationships.
• Observation and reporting – When Emma comes across a mismatch, she reports it to the respective person to take immediate action.
• Free your assets – Your accounts team can now focus on tasks that need manual intervention when Emma can take care of all the invoice processing.
• Rapid ROI and cost savings – Emma can save up to 80% of what you spend on manual invoice processing and help you increase your ROI significantly. 

Manual invoice processing VS Emma – Intelligent invoice processing

Manual Invoice Processing	SAXON’s EMMA
Tedious and labor-intensive process	Hassle-free process
Time-consuming	Takes only few secs
Highly prone to human errors	Accuracy is very high
Invoice processing is very expensive	Cost effective
Less data security	High data security
Risk of fraudulent activities	Data validation and verification protects your data
High chances of delay in payments	Timely payments
3-way invoice matching is complex to do	3-way invoice processing is easy and simple

Manual processing of invoices will be a threat to enterprises in the long run. Consider how much time your Accounts Payable department spends manually completing manual invoice processing. Errors, delays, squandered time, and effort are inevitable in manual invoicing methods, and it is hard to imagine that this method is still used by organizations today. It is necessary to embrace intelligent solutions for unspoken challenges. Here is where Emma can help you.

Choose Emma, our Digitalclerx as your invoice processing specialist today.